Advice for Teacher Bloggers

A good place to learn more about educational technology from teachers who are actually using it in classrooms is eSchool News's Ed Tech Insider.
This morning, Tom Hoffman has some really good advice for teachers who want to blog. A lengthy excerpt:

But based on my reading of the growing crop of teacher weblogs, I think the most important pieces of advice I'd give a teacher starting to blog is to assume that:

• you're going to keep doing it for a long time;


• lots of people are going to read your blog eventually;


• you will create a body of work which will benefit your career.

I would imagine that if you start blogging, you must on some level believe that those things are possible, but especially now, when there are still relatively few teachers doing this and interest is growing by leaps and bounds, if you've got any aptitude for it, you'll be successful.

Now, there are some implications of assuming you're going to successfully and professionally blog for a long time. Most importantly, you are going to want to take credit for your work. Even if you start out blogging anonymously, which may not be a bad idea, you should write as if everyone knows who you are. If 90% of your posts are professional and insightful, and 10% are sloppy, catty veiled attacks on people in your community, or references to issues with unnamed but identifiable students or parents, then you've screwed yourself. You can get away with that when you're anonymous (if nobody figures out who you are) but you can never take credit for the good stuff because you've saddled yourself forever with the lax, unprofessional crap.

If you're interested in more of Tom Hoffman's very frank and often fascinating ideas, check out his blog.